"Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; love is not irritable or resentful; love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but love rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, love believes all things, love hopes all things, love endures all things."

These beautifully poetic words adapted from the 13th Chapter of 1st Corinthians exquisitely focus our priority of living out of God’s love. It is a Christian priority. It is how we must live as followers of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, it is also an aspect of Christian living that is often overlooked for an idolatrous priority of doctrinal purity or righteous rigidity.

Christians love to rejoice in the truth. We hold tightly to God’s Word as revealed in scripture and are appropriately bold to profess our understanding of upholding Christ as the Truth. Yet, often in our zeal for Christ, Christians cross a heretical line and become sinfully boastful, arrogant, and rude. Rejoicing in the truth is one thing, but when it manifests as arrogance, God’s love is lost in the zeal. When we portray rudeness toward others, God’s love is transformed into judgment and disgrace.

What happens when Christians resort to boastful, arrogant, or rude expressions of our sincere faith is that we no longer rejoice in truth, but rather rejoice in wrongdoing. It is a subtle distinction, but when Christians take pious pride in calling out the sinner, condemning the false belief, and casting out the evil in our midst, it can quickly destroy love. In exploiting the evil around in order to advance the Christian faith, we serve an evil spirit of hatred and manipulation.

Faithful Christians recognize that ours is not an “Anything Goes” faith. There are standards of belief, conduct, practice, and faith expression that will explicitly define who is—and conversely who is not—a Christian. Of course, Christians do not always agree on those terms, but we all have them. It is, therefore, appropriate that all faithful believers draw prayerful distinctions in faith. It is critical that Christians say a distinctive “no” to things which fail to honor God as revealed in the Messiah. Yet, that “no” must be fully expressed in God’s love.

The 4th Chapter of Ephesians spells out this distinction in very practical terms. When faced with upholding the authenticity of Christian faith and witness, we are to “bear one another in love” and approach the world with “humility and gentleness.” Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is clear. We are to express and conduct ourselves through the characteristics of God’s love rather than succumb to the destruction of our natural angers, defensive postures, and propensity to hate that which we do not like or fully understand.

This is perhaps more relevant as we begin 2016 because the previous calendar year has been marked with intense hatred, anger, and contempt. By many standards, our society is more divided than it has been in at least the last 150 years. Our political system has further degenerated into campaigns of lies, half-truths, and fearmongering rather than genuine leadership and viable policy measures. Our economy increasingly divides the exceptionally rich from the poor and money continues to concentrate with a few at the top. Families are fractured as a whole host of destructive factors erode at the sanctity of the home and marriage. Ecological disaster and global climate change increasingly threaten the very existence of humanity on this planet. These denote just a few of the serious problems the Church must face in 2016.

This year, let all who profess a love for, and belief in, Jesus Christ, express that love through more than pushing beliefs onto others. Let us live 1 Corinthians 13 and Ephesians 4!